Alphonso Clark wasn’t in the best of health a year after a kidney transplant.

It was one of the reasons neighbors of his brick duplex home at 3676 Hudson St. kept an eye on the quiet man who mostly kept to himself.

One of the neighbors was Paulette Twiggs. In the two years Alphonso had been living next door to her he had established a pretty consistent pattern.

Alphonso Clark, 61

“Al was the kind of man that when he came in after work at night, he would immediately go into (the) kitchen, fix himself something to eat, and then watch TV,” Twiggs would tell former Denver Post reporter Sheba R. Wheeler, now a local photographer.

Twiggs explained that the only way someone would know he was home was if the kitchen light was on. They knew he was gone when one of his vehicles were gone. He had a Cadillac, a truck and a van.

Friends and neighbors knew that one of Alphonso’s favorite things to do was go to Black Hawk or Central City and gamble.

He lived alone, living off a Social Security disability check. He was the father of two and grandfather of three.

Alphonso also owned a junk yard at 43rd Avenue and Gaylord Street.

People knew that Alphonso kept a lot of cash in his home – thousands of dollars. One friend said he would have as much as between $3,000 and $4,000 in cash in the home at a time.

On March 25, 1997, one neighbor who called Alphonso “Mr. Al,” looked out her window and saw him standing in front of his pickup truck speaking with a man. It was a Tuesday.

The conversation was amicable though. Nothing suspicious about it.

But between 1:30 and 3 a.m. the next morning, she heard gunshots coming from the direction of Mr. Al’s home.

“I just glanced out my window and I watched, but I didn’t see anything,” she told Wheeler days later.

“No one went in to the house or came out. I just turned away and kept watching TV. It’s not uncommon to hear gunshots in this neighborhood.”

Days past. Twiggs grew concerned.

“My husband and I knew something was wrong because that kitchen light hadn’t been on for a couple of days,” she told Wheeler.

Other neighbors hadn’t seen the normally active man for days.

Alphonso’s sister, Earlene Clark, began to get concerned. She kept tabs on her brother by phone and lived nearby and would often visit in person.

Alphonso wasn’t in the best of health. Some began to worry he might be in trouble. Could he have died of kidney failure?

Earlene and her husband went to Alphonso’s home around 6 p.m. two days after the neighbor had heard the gunshots.

She had a key and unlocked the front door. She and her husband were immediately overwhelmed by an odor. They found Alphonso’s body lying on the living room floor.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.